Under an unpopular ruler conscription would probably lend itself to the speedy establishment of a Republic. But every year that King Alfonso lives he binds the Army, which is the very flesh and blood of the nation, more firmly to himself by ties of personal affection. And personal affection is a stronger force than political conviction alone ever has been or ever can be. In the seventies the Army stood for liberty and the Republic against Carlism and Ultramontanism, until Alfonso XII. was brought from his English college and offered to the nation which had seen his mother dethroned, as the mass of the nation always will believe, at the instigation of the Church. It was his mother’s personal popularity with the masses which made her son’s path comparatively smooth, notwithstanding the chaos of conflicting interests among which his lot was cast. His own honesty of purpose, his devotion to his people’s welfare, the Spartan simplicity of his private life, and the personal charm which he, in common with all his race, possessed, gave him a higher place in the affections of the nation than is at all realised outside of Spain, and the greatest hope expressed for King Alfonso XIII. by the poor is that he may take after his father. “He was a _man_,” they say. It was for the father’s sake that all parties agreed to call a truce during the anxious months that followed on his premature death, until his son was born, and it would be difficult to say how many times, while Queen Maria Cristina held the reins of Regency, the memory of her dead husband may have turned the tide in favour of their child, when the Ultramontanes would have used the national unrest to the profit of the proscribed branch. From the day that Alfonso XII. breathed his last, the Ultramontanes have consistently tried to represent the Queen Mother as closely attached to their party. The accusation is manifestly absurd. No mother would support a policy directed in the interests of a Pretender before that which maintains the rights of her own son. It is, indeed, a matter of history that in order to give the Opposition no excuse for agitation, Canovas, with true patriotism, recommended the grief-stricken Regent in the early days of her widowhood to entrust the Government to his opponents, the Liberals under Sagasta, in order to avoid a contest, so that to the latter fell the duty of proclaiming to the waiting nation the birth of Alfonso XIII., on May 17, 1886.[10] Canovas would not have acted thus had there been any real doubts of the loyalty of the Liberal party.